We lodged in a vast but dirty old Inn, waited on by a girl whose beauty compensated, in _Joe’s_ eyes only, for slipshod methods; nothing but my knowledge of the tongue would have procured us even the comfort of a huge warming-pan with which I endeavoured to dry the damp sheets. After a sleepless night and a tiring morning in the Castle looking at the Mantegna portraits of grim Gonzagas and stooping to enter the “dwarf’s apartments,” whence slits of windows peer upon the eerie marshland, I was in no mood for an altercation. Yet an altercation was the only means by which I finally succeeded in inducing the morose custodian of a dark church in the town to do Joe’s will: he had come to Mantova to see examples of Mantegna for some work that he was doing and he was not going away without having unearthed this specially interesting one. He led the way himself to the side-chapel where he believed the painting to be, but lo! a hideous modern daub hung over the little altar and his face fell. Then he had an inspiration: in spite of the man’s remonstrances he went up the steps and peered behind the gaudy painting. “Tell him I’ll pay him to help me get this thing down,” he said: “I believe what I want is at the back of it.” Then my altercation began. We were mad English, and one couldn’t behave in a Church as if it were a shop. But “mad English” or not we were also “rich English” (in the custodian’s eyes), and a very little English gold won the day: we saw the picture we wanted. These were only a few instances of the “tonic of a young man’s conceit and obstinacy”--to use Joe’s own chaff of himself--in that never-to-be-forgotten journey through the highways and by-ways of Northern Italy. Everything was grist that came to his mill in this as in each separate field of his activities; but Florence was the real goal of all his desires, and this first visit to it, close on the study which had made him long to see for himself the Masters whom he loved and the fairest of towns which was their home, had a glamour which was never quite reached in later visits. I can see again the poor _Trattorìa della Luna_ where we lodged and the handsome waiter whom we, in the wild enthusiasm of the hour, persuaded to follow us to England. That he ever arrived at all was the marvel. He might well have spent the journey-money given him on pastimes suggested by his reproach to me in London afterwards as to engaging a cook who remembered the birth of Christ: that he arrived weeping in a November fog and bitterly resenting having been left to come “by sea when we had come by land,” was not wonderful. Joe was patient with him for my sake and many a funny tale did he forge out of the Italian’s vagaries.